


Ends Against the Middle

by forthegreatergood



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Getting Together, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Pining, mentioned Dinah Lance/Bruce Wayne, mentioned Dinah Lance/Oliver Queen/Bruce Wayne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:49:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6896416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the obstacles Bruce expected when he decided to make a move on Hal, Oliver's attempt to speed things along wasn't one of them.</p><hr/><p>“How did you even know he’s interested in me?” Hal grumbled.  </p><p>“He fights with you,” Oliver said, as if it was self-evident.</p><p>“And that sounds like an emotionally healthy individual, to you.” </p><p>“It sounds like he respects you and thinks you’re worth arguing with,” Oliver explained. “It sounds like he wants to convince you he’s right, because he values your opinion of him.  You know what I get?  A screenshot of ‘why that won’t work’ punched into the searchbar at Let Me Google That For You.  You know what Booster Gold gets?  Hung up on.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of DC and their respective parent companies.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Hal sipped his champagne and snagged another canape before the server could artfully angle the tray away from him without making it seem deliberate. She gave him a long-suffering look before disappearing into the crowd, and he wondered if Bruce had passed their pictures around with a strict warning not to let him, Wally, or Clark turn the appetizers into dinner. 

He still wasn’t sure exactly why he had to be there. Diana and Ollie, he understood. Dinah would be there if Oliver was there, unless she was working a case. Clark made sense, if only because there was no way Lois was going to miss it, and it would look weird for him to bow out if she was going. Wally never turned down free food and fancy dress, so it would have been rude not to invite him, even if it would have shaved a few points off the caterer’s bill. But Hal….He looked at the crowd around him, really _looked_ at them, and didn’t see anyone but the servers and other heroes who couldn’t pay his bills with pocket-change.

Not that he wouldn’t happily wine and dine on Bruce’s tab. It was for a good cause, and it wasn’t like the man couldn’t spare it. And, as Carol was fond of pointing out, Hal didn’t get many nights off anymore. But Bruce had only invited him out of obligation, and somehow Oliver hadn’t picked up on it. Hal figured it was probably because Oliver had been raised by wolves instead of stern English butlers, and had consequently never gotten sent to school with enough for the entire class on birthdays and Valentine’s Day because getting pointedly left out hurt people’s feelings.

“Sounds like a great party, but I’m on patrol that night,” Hal had said. Bruce had simply nodded, but Oliver had snatched the card out of his hands and looked at the date.

“I’ll get Barda and Mr. Miracle to cover for you. The Tattooed Guy’ll never know what hit him, and they’ll get a vacation from their vacation. Where’s my invite?”

“You RSVPed three weeks before the date was finalized,” Bruce had reminded him. To his credit, he hadn’t betrayed any sense of humoring either of them.

“I don’t have a tux,” Hal had pointed out.

“We can get you one tomorrow. I need a new one anyway.” Oliver had looked positively thrilled at the prospect of dragging him along on a shopping trip and utterly oblivious to the fact that being an adult meant not imposing when the invitation was just a nod to manners. “Unless the dress-code is down with showing up in a jacket with a few bullet-holes?”

“It is not,” Bruce had told him firmly.

“And stop glaring at me like that, Hal. I was obviously wearing a vest underneath it.”

Hal’s eyes swept the room again. It probably helped that it was easy to avoid anyone unwelcome in a crowd this big. Hell, even if Bruce had been absolutely and sincerely delighted by everyone’s presence, he’d have a hard time letting all two hundred-odd attendees and their plus-ones know it. Not that he wasn’t trying. Hal had seen Bruce bring less practiced efficiency to fights. 

Hal realized abruptly that it was because Bruce had been doing this longer. This was what he’d actually been born to do, meant to do. He tried to imagine a world where Bruce had spent his life being Bruce at malaria or poverty instead of just raising money for the people who were, then stopped himself. ‘What If?’ wasn’t a game that had ever been kind to him. 

_What if_ his dad hadn’t died? _What if_ Tom hadn’t followed his high-school sweetheart back to Alaska? _What if_ he and Carol had had longer together before he’d gotten the ring? _What if_ he’d noticed while Sinestro was going batshit crazy with power?

Hal drained his glass, abruptly restless. He’d decided against Oliver’s suggestion that he pick up a hot socialite looking to make a mistake before he’d even checked his coat, which left appallingly few things to do besides drink and watch Lois pounce on unsuspecting corporate bastards. Bruce was finally circling back in his direction. All Hal needed to do was catch his eye, make his excuses, and leave. They were in Central City, after all, not Gotham; he could find a seedy bar and hit on a girl more his speed without getting knifed five ways from Sunday and having his shoes stolen. He’d even stowed a change of clothes in his trunk so he could drive home looking like something other than a complete jerkoff.

He’d finally gotten the wording down for exactly the right level of gratitude--not dismissive, but definitely not getting roped into it again--when Bruce paused, met his eyes, and gave him a blatant once-over before Hal could start talking. Hal’s stomach flipped, and he could feel a flush starting on his cheeks.

“Enjoying the party?” Bruce asked.

_Did you just eye-fuck me?_ Hal wanted to ask. There was a warm, inviting smile on Bruce’s lips, and how had he never noticed exactly how perfect they’d look wrapped around his suddenly-thickening cock?

Hal grabbed another flute off a passing tray and managed to fake a smile as he raised it. “It’s great. Wally cleans out one more waitress, and I’m going to walk out of here twenty bucks richer.”

Bruce laughed, a chuckle as fake as Hal’s smile, but there was a look of genuine fondness in his eyes as he shook his head.

“I can’t blame him. The caterers have outdone themselves this time.” He leaned in a little closer. “I was wondering--”

“Brucie! Who’s your friend?” 

A blonde appeared at Bruce’s side, one arm automatically threading around his elbow. She leaned close against him and batted enormous brown eyes at Hal, and Hal stifled a sympathetic flinch. But Bruce patted her hand and smiled indulgently instead of going stiff and cold and growling at her. Hal decided he must have wandered into another dimension the last time he’d grabbed a plate of shrimp.

“Linda, may I introduce Captain Hal Jordan?” Bruce said smoothly. “Hal, this is Linda Page.”

“Of the San Antonio Pages,” she added, a trifle defiantly, and Hal warmed up to her a little in spite of the moment she’d interrupted with Bruce.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, extending his hand. 

“Linda, there you are!” A sultry brunette with a dazzling smile broke from a knot of people to join them, and Hal recognized a well-coordinated assault when he saw one. She took Bruce’s other arm, and Bruce let himself be dragged back toward the terrace.

Bruce didn’t bother with a backward glance at him, and Hal had time to entertain the creeping suspicion that the look Bruce had given him had been purely for the audience. Hal was the only cape who’d come stag, after all. And maybe Bruce had meant to needle him, or had just assumed it would be understood as a performance. But if it hadn’t been...Hal swallowed. 

For all his daydreaming about what it would be like to fuck Bruce, he’d never imagined he had a real shot at getting to do it. But that look had promised all manner of things, and Hal was absolutely certain that he could cram at least half of them into one night if he tried very hard and hydrated properly beforehand. Warmth pooled low in his belly, and his hands itched. What the hell would Bruce even feel like without the suit in the way?

Hal realized he was staring and deliberately turned away, looking for Oliver. Oliver would talk him down. Oliver would tell him what a terrible idea this was. Oliver would point out that Hal had once compared trying to have a conversation with Bruce to chipping away at a brick wall with a butter knife. Hal could hear Oliver laughing, the loud, brassy belly-laugh carrying over the murmur of dozens of conversations. He finally spotted him at the epicenter of a rapt audience, from which he’d likely only be extracted under vigorous protest and by brute force. Judging by the gestures he was making, he was telling everyone about the time he’d been kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of strippers. 

Hal sighed and headed for the garden. That he was looking to Oliver to be the voice of reason already told him everything he needed to know about the wisdom of hitting on Bruce. The fresh air would clear his head.

He just needed to consider every League meeting for the past six months, he told himself. He was clearly being ridiculous. He and Bruce could barely be in the same room for more than five minutes without an argument breaking out. That he wanted to end half those arguments by grabbing Bruce and kissing him made this a worse idea, not a better one.

Hal polished off his drink and wondered if he should park himself at the wet bar for the next half hour. If he got drunk enough, he could blame all of this on the booze in the morning. He had enough in his pocket for a cab and enough on his debit card for a hotel. Sure, he ran the risk of winding up on Wally’s couch and on the receiving end of Wally’s fussing over the inevitable hangover instead, but he’d have an excuse in the event that Bruce wasn’t serious. 

He could practically hear the cold incredulity in Bruce’s tone. _“Please don’t tell me I need to explain the concept of a cover identity to you, Lantern.”_

It would send whatever respect he’d earned in Bruce’s eyes up in smoke. As grudgingly as it had been given, and as much as Bruce hated being wrong, Hal couldn’t imagine him passing on the opportunity to revert to his previous opinion of Hal as a dick-driven, showboating amateur.

“Admiring the view?” Bruce asked. 

Hal spun, startled, and blinked at him. There was a soft curve to his mouth, and a certain timbre to his voice that made Hal think Bruce already was. _What if?_

“You could say that.” He pulled Bruce against him and kissed him hard, then eased back, his eyes going to the surprised expression on Bruce’s face. “I just totally misread the situation, didn’t I?”

Then Bruce’s hands were on his ass, and Bruce’s mouth was on his. Hal was dizzy by the time Bruce let him up for air, and he realized that he was already embarrassingly close to hard just from that.

“Not how I’d put it, no,” Bruce murmured. He nudged Hal’s mouth open again, gently this time, and Hal wrapped his arms around Bruce’s waist.

“I don’t suppose there’s an after-party we could hit?” Hal asked. If this was a limited-time offer, he was going to make the most of it. “Maybe someplace with a lock on the door and nobody waiting to ambush you with a business proposal?”

“I’m sure we can find one,” Bruce said. He was almost smirking, but the dark of his eyes made Hal think of every prototype jet he’d ever gotten his hands on. Bruce didn’t do things by halves.

He followed Bruce down a series of hallways, his head swimming with lust and anticipation. They were slipping away into one of the wings, he thought. Someplace they wouldn’t be disturbed, even by the staff. He reached out and took Bruce’s hand, then found Bruce crowding him up against the wall and kissing him, his hands sliding over Hal’s hips and palming him through his slacks. Hal groaned and thrust against him, trying for friction he knew he wouldn’t get through that much cloth.

“We should--” It was cut off by another kiss, and then Bruce was fumbling with a doorknob and guiding them into what looked like temporary storage. A dresser was shoved haphazardly in one corner, next to a divan that had been turned on its end and propped up behind a huge stack of linens. One wall was completely obscured cardboard boxes labeled with various paper and cleaning products.

“I could get us a proper room, if you want to wait,” Bruce offered. His hands slid under Hal’s jacket, and his fingertips traced the length of Hal’s spine.

“Just lock the door,” Hal hissed, fighting with his tie. Bruce was gently guiding his hands away a moment later and undoing the knot with a practiced patience. He unbuttoned Hal’s collar next, then kept going, the expression on his face rapt enough that Hal couldn’t wish he’d hurry.

“Gorgeous,” Bruce murmured, and Hal let his lip curl.

“You think so, huh?” he asked. “You should see me when I come.”


	2. Chapter 2

“You look like you got about ten minutes of sleep last night,” Oliver commented, sounding strangely pleased with himself. Usually when he got stuck on the Watchtower first thing on a Saturday morning, he was barely verbal until noon.

“That might be overestimating it,” Hal said, rooting through the cabinet to find the oversized coffee mug he knew was in there. He and Wally were the only ones who used it, and Wally was off-duty all week. He finally found it, poured a third of the pot into it, and sank into the chair opposite Oliver. 

Hal had forgotten he could feel this sore without actually being injured. Then again, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d come so hard he couldn’t think--literally hadn’t been able to do more than stutter “Don’t stop” in Bruce’s ear--either, so he supposed that was a reasonable thing to have slipped his mind. Bruce had been gentle and relentless and had looked at him with something between hunger and worship, and Hal had wrung every last drop out of the night before the spell broke. They’d been in sync in a way they rarely were outside of battle, only this time there’d been no fear, no pain, no armor, no constructs. Just them, just Bruce and everything Hal had ever thought of doing with him on those long and lonely nights away from home when it hadn’t seemed so implausible that Bruce might want him, too. 

Hal tried to stretch a little without making it obvious.

“You and Bruce had a good time, then?” Oliver asked smugly.

Hal almost choked on his coffee. He hadn’t meant to showcase their departure, and he’d assumed they’d left the party more or less unremarked. He swallowed with difficulty, coughed for a few moments, and then fixed Ollie with an irritated frown. The last thing he needed was a delayed walk of shame courtesy of Oliver’s big mouth, and he was too tired to play like the inevitable jokes wouldn’t get to him.

“Excuse me?”

“You and Bruce had a good time, then?” Oliver repeated, a little louder. “I’m only asking because I need to know whether or not to send my tailor a gift basket. I mean, the only thing I told him was ‘make him look hot as hell’ when he asked how to cut the tux, and I think he did a damn fine job, but the proof is in the pudding.”

“You...you…” Hal sputtered. He hadn’t had enough coffee for this. “You set this up?” He stopped, another explanation presenting itself. “You and Bruce set this up.”

“Bruce? No.” Oliver shook his head sharply. “Fuck no. In fact, please, please do not mention this to him. I really don’t want to be garrotted with my own bowstring again.”

“Again?” Hal asked.

Oliver shrugged. “It happens. I think it’s what passes for dramatic irony in criminal circles or something. Anyway, the only angle I was working was yours.”

“So you tried to hook me up with a guy who’s never met a fight he didn’t want to pick with me,” Hal said sourly. It almost sounded like a prank, coming out of Oliver’s mouth. “Thanks, buddy.”

“Look, how long’s it been since you’ve gotten laid?” Oliver asked, and Hal recognized the tone as Oliver’s go-to for trying to sound reasonable. He’d picked it up from Shayera, Hal was pretty sure. “A year? Five? Since the paleolithic?”

Hal glared at him, and Oliver spread his hands.

“It’s been long enough that my dick’s in mourning for yours, okay? I have Sympathetic Boner-Loss Syndrome, thanks to you.”

“Oh my god,” Hal groaned, putting his head in his hands. The image Oliver had conjured was going to kill him.

“And you keep weaseling out of any event where you might conceivably break your dry spell,” Oliver continued, ignoring Hal’s theatrics. “So I took matters into my own hands.”

“But Bruce?” It wasn’t like he’d ever gotten hammered enough to confess to his crush on Bruce; he was aware of how it reflected on him. How Oliver hadn’t picked up on that was beyond him.

“He’s interested in you, he’s hot, and he fucks like it’s an Olympic sport,” Oliver explained. He somehow looked even more self-satisfied. “And if it turns regular, he already knows you’re Green Lantern, so you can’t screw it up by forgetting what lie you told because you couldn’t say ‘I have to go fight an alien dictator in space right now, sorry I can’t make your sister’s birthday party.’ Well, I guess you _can_ \--I mean, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life, here--but it would be pointless and dumb.”

“This is you not telling me how to live my life?” Hal grunted. He took a deep gulp of coffee and almost wished he’d put his foot down about attending the party in the first place. The memory of Bruce’s hands on his skin and Bruce’s mouth on his cock was the only thing that made him check the thought.

“And failing one of you finally making a move,” Oliver continued, “I figured you’d at least pick somebody up. So either way you’d be waking up in a mansion with a looker and someone manning the kitchen who could make you a decent breakfast.”

“How did you even know he’s interested in me?” Hal grumbled. He didn’t see Bruce being any more forthcoming than he’d been on that score, even if Bruce was more likely to lack the self-awareness to know why he should keep his mouth shut about it. Hal had certainly never dared entertain any real hope, that was for sure.

“He fights with you,” Oliver said, as if it was self-evident.

“And that sounds like an emotionally healthy individual, to you.” 

Bruce fought with everyone. It was what he did, like it was written into his DNA. Hal was hardly unique in that regard. He took a deep pull from his mug and tried to come up with a way to articulate the fact that he didn’t need his friends interfering in his sex life in terms Oliver couldn’t cheerfully misinterpret.

“It sounds like he respects you and thinks you’re worth arguing with,” Oliver retorted. “It sounds like he wants to convince you he’s right, because he values your opinion of him. You know what I get? A screenshot of ‘why that won’t work’ punched into the searchbar at Let Me Google That For You. You know what Booster Gold gets? Hung up on.”

The caffeine finally hit Hal’s brain, and his eyes narrowed. “Wait, how do you know how Bruce is in bed?”

“A gentleman never tells,” Oliver said primly.

“Ollie, you’re straight. And you’re not a gentleman.”

“Have you seen him in a speedo?” Oliver asked. “I’m willing to admit that guys so straight they wouldn’t hit that exist, but I’m taking it on faith, because I’ve never seen any evidence of it. I mean, if you blow up a diagram of the Kinsey scale, there’re these hypothetical points after zero and six where they put men so straight they wouldn’t bang Bruce Wayne and women so gay they wouldn’t bang Bruce Wayne.”

“That’s not a thing,” Hal sighed.

“Sure it is. It’s like the sections for invisible wavelengths on the light spectrum,” Oliver explained. “Researchers discovered the phenomenon after Diana’s first press conference.”

Hal ran his fingers through his hair, and Oliver grinned at him.

“So you and Bruce…?” Hal prompted.

This time Oliver had the decency to blush. Hal rolled his eyes and distracted himself from a weird pang of jealousy by trying to do the math. 

“What were you, in grade school? You’ve been with Dinah for like a hundred years.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Oliver said, waving a hand dismissively. His posture was too rigid, though, and for the first time since he’d started harassing Hal about it, he wasn’t smiling.

“You didn’t cheat on Dinah with him. Even if I wouldn’t necessarily put it past you, he wouldn’t have.”

Bruce might have known Oliver since before it had ever occurred to either of them to put on a cape and spend their nights fighting crime, but Bruce and Dinah were close enough that new members routinely assumed they were partners. If he ever had to pick a side in that marriage, Hal didn’t see the decision going in Oliver’s favor.

Oliver’s cheeks shaded from pink into red, and he drummed his fingers on the table. “Can we just drop it?”

Hal took another gulp of coffee, his stomach suddenly a tight knot. “You _and_ Dinah.”

“More him and Dinah,” Oliver said, looking down. “They had a thing before we got together. It was her birthday. What was I going to say? No, honey, let’s not try to talk one of the few guys I’ve ever wanted to blow into bed, I totally want to miss the one chance I’m probably ever going to have of landing this guy and making you deliriously happy at the same time?”

“Ollie, I’m not judging,” Hal sighed.

“You kind of look like you’re judging,” Oliver told him, crossing his arms.

“That’s not what I’m doing.” Hal wasn’t sure what the hell he was doing, but he knew it wasn’t judging Oliver. “It was just a one-time thing, right?”

Oliver’s eyebrows went up as seeming comprehension dawned. “Jesus, Hal, seriously?”

“Seriously, what?” Hal demanded.

“You cannot be this far gone after one night. I mean, I know you spend twenty percent of any given mission trying to impress him, but still.”

“I’m not,” Hal snapped, suddenly irritated that he’d been so transparent. “And I don’t.”

“You do, too.” Oliver looked thoughtful. “Then again...”

“ _What?_ ” Hal grunted, glaring at him. 

The thought of having to compete with Oliver and Dinah as a pair sending him into a cold panic didn’t mean anything except that he was running on too little sleep, too little caffeine, and too many hormones. It was his nervous system on autopilot, latching onto the first thing that presented itself as an excuse to ramp up. Just because Ollie had been half-right about his love life--it had been almost a year since Hal had managed anything more than a disappointing one-night stand here and there--it didn’t mean he was going to mistake a good time with Bruce for a future with Bruce.

And there was a difference between wanting to impress Bruce, which he could give a damn about, and wanting to rub Bruce’s face in precisely how wrong he was about every uncharitable opinion he’d ever had of Hal, which he occasionally wanted so badly that it made his teeth ache.

“Well, the thing is, if you two really hit it off, that would be two birds with one stone,” Oliver said slowly. “You know Tim’s off to college next month, right?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Hal asked.

“Having never had a sidekick, I’ll forgive you for not knowing that it’s like having a toddler,” Oliver said magnanimously. “Regular teenagers, you have to worry about what, their grades? Them not killing themselves on the road or turning their lives into an after-school special?”

“I think it might be a little more involved than that,” Hal said. Not that he’d really gotten to see Jack’s kids much in the past few years, but what he had been able to keep up with seemed drama-laden and fairly complicated.

“Well, with sidekicks, it’s just...non-stop. Constant. There are vanishingly few parts that you can let them figure out for themselves, because literal knife-fights are involved. Life-and-death is what we do. But you’re the adult, so you’re trying to keep yourself in one piece and manage them at the same time. Like, are they keeping up with school-work? Are they handling the hero thing, mentally?” Oliver gestured wildly, his eyes going wide. “Do they need more training than you can provide, and who’d be best to give it to them? Is heroing stunting their emotional and social growth, and we need to cut back so they can do normal-kid shit for a while?” He shook his head. “And they’re kids, so you have to use your words for every last bit of it. It’s just ‘Stop telegraphing your punches,’ and ‘Stop flirting with Bad Penny,’ and ‘Make sure you get those college applications in on time,’ and ‘It says right on the bottle not to mix bleach with vinegar,’ and blah blah friggin’ blah. It literally never ends. It’s exhausting.” 

Oliver looked haunted just sitting there, and Hal pursed his lips. 

“And Thea and Roy weren’t even my kids,” Oliver continued after a moment. “I could send them home at the end of the night. They get caught cheating on a test, or start asking about the birds and the bees, or wanting to know if there’s a heaven for dogs, I could fob that one off on our mom or Roy’s parents. The only one Bruce could ever do that with was Babs, and that was probably cancelled out by her and Dick having the most chronic case of puppy-love I’ve ever seen.”

“So I could be the answer to Bruce’s empty-nest blues?” Hal asked. “Because, much as I assume you meant it as a compliment and am willing to consider myself flattered in that regard, I’ll pass.”

“I’d give my favorite Ferrari for this to be about Bruce moping over another Robin leaving the nest,” Oliver said, shuddering. “With Tim out of the house and rolling with the Titans full-time, all that energy currently going to him is going to turn into this… _tornado_ of bad decisions if it’s not channeled. You know, appropriately.”

“Channeled appropriately?” Hal echoed drily. There was definitely a part of him that could live with Bruce’s energy being channeled into more of what he’d gotten last night.

“You’re at least on the right side of the law,” Oliver told him. “God help us all, if it’s not you, it’ll probably be Poison Ivy this time.” He rubbed his eyes. “Or Quinn.”

“Aren’t they together?” Hal asked. He felt a spiteful bit of satisfaction as the color drained from Oliver’s face. 

“There wouldn’t be a city left,” Oliver groaned. “That just shot to the top of my extinction-level event scenarios. Thanks, Hal.”

“Not that I’m not genuinely charmed by your idea that I can distract Bruce for a few months until he picks up some new urchin with a grudge and a criminal lack of adult supervision--”

“It’s not a distraction, it’s...I don’t know. The kids grow up and leave home, and suddenly he’s got all this time on his hands and starts thinking that maybe he can negotiate having a real partner this time, only he’s got absolutely--”

“If you say terrible taste in sex partners, I’m going to smack you,” Hal said evenly.

“I was going to say no sense of self-preservation,” Oliver said, smirking, “but now that you mention it…”

“You just admitted to being on that list, buddy.”

Oliver spread his hands and gave him a beatific look. “There are certain things I accept about myself, Hal. You know, in pursuit of inner peace and all that.”

Hal snorted and drained his coffee. He liked Oliver better when he wasn’t blithely meddling in Hal’s love life.

“Like I said, I’m flattered, but that sort of assumes Bruce even wants to come back for seconds,” he pointed out. He hadn’t been the only one acting like he was getting while the getting was good in that storage room.

“He’s interested, Hal,” Oliver scoffed. “And I think you’re probably the only human on the roster who can’t see it. Hell, half the aliens have picked up on it, too. If it went well, believe me, he’ll call. Unless you made it clear it was a one-time offer?”

“Why would I have done that?”

Oliver shrugged. “Bruce isn’t the only one prone to doing unbelievably stupid things?”

“Hey!”

“You asked,” Oliver said defensively. “All I’m saying is that if you feel like giving this a shot, you’d be keeping him out of trouble. Don’t think of it like ‘Oh no I’m asking him to wait for me while I’m off-planet for a fucking month, he’s wasting his life.’ Think of it like ‘Every month he spends pining over me while I’m in the depths of space is another month he’s not picking up for a genocidal maniac who he’ll never _not_ believe when she says she’s changed.’ It’s win-win.”

“They have a kid together, Ollie. That’s got to be a hell of an impetus to believe someone when they say they want to go straight.”

Oliver rolled his eyes. “Damian was the result of his third time on the scary-go-round, Hal. I know I don’t have any room to talk in terms of bad ideas and the people who have them, but just think about it, okay? You could get laid like crazy and save the world at the exact same time.”

“If I promise that yes, I will think about it, can we just, I don’t know, pretend we never had this conversation?” Hal asked. 

A sunny smile broke across Oliver’s face, and he raised his coffee cup in a mock-toast. “It’s a deal.” 

Hal put his face in his hands. It was too early for this.


	3. Chapter 3

Oliver dropped a take-out bag on the desk and folded himself into the chair on the other side of it, putting his feet up on the very edge of the desk and tipping the chair back on two legs in the same smooth motion. Bruce watched him, aware that there was some lurking irritation beneath the thick layer of frank appreciation for the efficiency of Oliver’s insolence but unable to do more than make a note of it. He’d never met anyone who could give as much offense, as quickly, as Oliver did without actually _doing_ much of anything, and he suspected he never would.

“So you and Hal, huh?” he asked, grinning broadly.

“The quarterly production quota for the Latin American division of Queen Industries is radically out of proportion to its quarterly budget,” Bruce said. He clicked a small remote control, and the far wall lit up with a chart detailing his findings. “That’s a problem in general, and more specifically a problem with the proposed supply contract with Omniversal R&D.”

Oliver glanced from Bruce’s perfectly serious expression to the display and back. “Are you fucking kidding me with this right now?”

“No more so than when I scheduled this meeting to talk about this problem two weeks ago,” Bruce told him. He imagined that if he were a better man, he’d feel some guilt at taking the wind out of Oliver’s sails so thoroughly.

“Two weeks ago, you and Hal weren’t screwing each other’s brains out,” Oliver said, crossing his arms and pouting.

Bruce clicked to the next slide. “Based on the purchase and extraction reports for raw materials, I suspect the problem is two-fold.”

“Are those two folds that you’re the worst and also that you wouldn’t know the best thing to ever happen to you if he texted you a picture of his junk?”

“On the one hand, and this is by far the less serious issue, it’s likely Queen Industries Latin America will hit an operational deficit before the end of the quarter. They’re finessing the numbers to tell the accountants what they want to hear. We can budget around that and keep an eye on stock prices to minimize any disruption or loss of investor confidence.” Bruce clicked to the next slide, steadfastly ignoring the high-pitched noises Oliver was making in protest. “On the other hand, I believe that they’re also systematically underpaying their workers. The most likely explanation is that immigrants recently refused entry to Mexico are being exploited, but it’s also possible they’re coercing local labor by--”

“If I say I’ll look into it, because yes, you’re right, that absolutely sounds like a problem I need to take care of if true, will you please stop stonewalling me?” Oliver groaned.

Bruce didn’t know if he had words to properly describe how perfect, how completely perfect it had been to have Hal unstrung and begging with pleasure, practically glowing with it, because of him. Whatever else happened between them, he’d at least been able to do that much for Hal. He did know he had neither the desire nor any intention of discussing it with anyone else, especially Oliver.

“No, because under no circumstances am I going to sit here with you and talk about a fellow League-member’s hypothetical sex life behind his back,” Bruce said, clicking to the next slide. 

Oliver dropped his feet, leaned forward, snatched the remote out of Bruce’s hand, and tossed it across the room, where it landed neatly in a potted plant. He turned back to Bruce, smug and grinning. Bruce sighed and pulled the back-up remote out of a drawer, and Oliver glared at him, all trace of triumph gone. 

“ _Seriously?_ ”

“Be less predictable,” Bruce suggested.

“I’m completely willing to take every annoying little clicky thing you have and give them to your secretary to hold onto until after lunch,” Oliver said. “And you know this, because I’m apparently predictable.”

Bruce steepled his fingers and waited, and Oliver’s eyes narrowed.

After a long moment, Bruce sighed. “I assumed you were going somewhere with that.”

“I am. I just needed to be sure you were taking me seriously,” Oliver said.

“About your willingness to inform one of my employees that she was not to return my possessions, of which you’d relieved me, until you tell her to.”

“Exactly.” Oliver opened the bag and shoved a panini at him, showering the blotter with crumbs. “So, now that we’re on the same page, I’m going to tell you three things.”

Bruce looked down at the sandwich, his brow furrowed.

“It’s sort of like an oyster po-boy, only better, because it’s toasted,” Oliver said. “Just eat it.”

“Was that--”

“Four things,” Oliver corrected, taking a bite of his sandwich.

“I see.” Bruce took a careful, exploratory bite, and Oliver rolled his eyes and swallowed. Bruce wasn’t sure he’d even really chewed it. Oliver’s friends-and-family table manners tended to have more in common with a stray cat’s than a human being’s.

Oliver held up a finger. “If you hurt him, for instance by being really unbelievably you about everything, I’ll tell Dinah and Clark and J’onn, and they will all be collectively very disappointed in your behavior.”

“I see.”

“I’m not kidding. Plus, the entire League has been stuck trying to ignore you two and your weird alpha-male mating-dance for years. If you choke now, we’re setting up a time-out corner and adding bylaws about senior members not being allowed to fight-flirt in public.” Oliver held up a second finger. “Deficits in training or mistakes made during recent missions are not acceptable topics for post-coital discussion.”

Bruce grimaced. “Oliver, you almost died.”

“And the time and place for talking about it is not before the afterglow fades,” Oliver told him, his tone firm. 

“And I apologized that day.”

“Yes, and I recognize that, for you, that’s the equivalent of a grand romantic gesture,” Oliver said, waving his hand. “I’m telling you this because I’m a good friend who cares about you both, and because I’m still, in spite of the overwhelming generosity of spirit demonstrated by your same-day apology, a little miffed about it three years later. Which should give you some indication of about how well it would go over, hypothetically speaking, with Hal.”

“And the last thing?” Bruce asked, suddenly tired of the conversation. What had he been thinking? Of course anything more than a fling with Hal wasn’t in the cards. If he couldn’t make it through one weekend with a pair of close friends without giving the sort of offense that had Oliver bringing it up now, how did he expect to navigate something long-term with a man who spent as much time challenging him as he did breathing?

He’d thought that maybe now, with Damian growing up and Tim moving out, he’d have the sort of time and mental space to at least try for something with Hal. Every time they’d squabbled about nothing and Clark had sighed and said “Just ask him out already” once Hal had stormed off, it had been difficult not to tell Clark it was already on the calendar. The party had been the perfect opportunity to make a pass Hal could ignore or acknowledge, as it suited him, without putting him on the spot or embarrassing either of them too badly if Bruce had misinterpreted Hal’s level of interest.

Bruce didn’t expect it to be easy; even if they’d been perfectly compatible, their lives were complicated. He’d been tempted to proposition Hal so many times over the years, to trade what he really wanted for what he could get. It had been difficult to be patient, to hope that when he did ask, Hal would want more than a quick fuck. In the event Hal said yes to more than one night, Bruce hadn’t wanted it to wind another might-have-been, like with Vicki, or another if-only, like with Silver, good relationships which had foundered due to bad timing or bigger priorities. He hadn’t wanted another regret notched on his bedpost, and he was old enough to understand some of his past mistakes. Or at least he’d thought he was. If the problem was simply _him_...

“Quit brooding and eat your damn sandwich, Bruce,” Oliver said cheerfully.

Bruce gave him a cold look. He’d rolled the dice with Hal. They’d come up in his favor when Hal had kissed him, fucked him, left with a smile on his face. He’d had a good feeling about calling Hal later that night and asking him out for dinner. Oliver could at least feel a sliver of guilt about dousing the first flutter of optimism Bruce had felt in months. Then again, he seemed to have lost interest in hearing a play-by-play of his night with Hal, which was something.

“So you’ll look into the budgetary discrepancies?” Bruce asked.

“I already said I would, didn’t I?”

“No. You phrased it as a conditional, the terms of which I rejected.”

“Yes, I will look into your stupid budgetary discrepancies,” Oliver sighed. “And yes, I will make sure the administrative end is taken care of along with punching any faces that really need punching.”

Bruce frowned.

“And yes, I will also make sure all my vaccines are up to date before loitering in mosquito-infested compounds in an attempt to determine how much of this is your paranoia and how much of this is the world being its usual shitty self,” Oliver finished. He snorted at the look on Bruce’s face. “ _Now_ who’s predictable?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Bruce protested. He’d learned a very long time ago that Oliver was a grown man who was nevertheless capable of acting like a five-year-old when it came to good advice, especially when it came from him. If he’d been particularly concerned about anything Oliver was likely to do, he’d have needed to casually suggest a solution to Dinah, to whom Oliver might listen, or to Hal, who wasn’t above getting Oliver drunk before proposing it as a dare.

“Liar.” Oliver said it without heat, though, and stole what was left of Bruce’s sandwich.

“I was eating that,” Bruce told him mildly. It had actually tasted quite good. Oliver’s culinary sensibilities were fairly reliable, with the caveat that he seemed to consider a lack of health department certification to be a sign of nebulously-defined authenticity instead of a pointless risk.

“See previous response.” Oliver bit into it. “So, last thing on my list. Whenever you get around to deciding that Hal needs somebody taking care of him, because God knows he’s not going to ask for help even when he obviously needs it, don’t just pack up all his stuff without asking and move it into a guest room in the manor. He’ll go ballistic.”

Bruce tried to imagine the series of events during which Oliver had discovered this fact.

“The insight you’re offering here is that whenever I decide, unilaterally, that an adult man who has not yet agreed--and may not ever agree--to any sort of romantic arrangement with me needs someone else running his affairs, he’ll be even more upset if I also commit several felonies against him in the pursuit of that.”

Oliver nodded. “Except I didn’t sound like a complete jackass when I said it.”

“Yes, you did.” Bruce kneaded his temples. This was not how he’d expected the meeting to go, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember why. It wasn’t like this was the first time he’d tried to discuss something serious with Oliver. “You understand that there’s every chance, hypothetically speaking, that I will receive a text within the next twelve hours indicating very clearly that there will not be a hypothetical encore performance, and that this isn’t to change our working relationship.”

“If those are the odds you’re coming up with, you’re looking at a very different set of numbers than I am,” Oliver said. “And no, I didn’t. Look, you know he’s not drawing a pension yet, and he’s obviously not making much working for Ferris when he’s not even in the freaking solar system. If his bank account gets overdrawn while he’s not around to deal with it, all his stuff’s going to wind up in a dumpster or auctioned off in a lot at some eviction sale, and then he’s going to come back homeless with just the clothes on his back. I was being proactive.”

“By breaking into his apartment and stealing his things,” Bruce said. “While he was off-planet.”

“I left a note.” Oliver spread his hands, and Bruce watched a light dusting of bread flakes fall to the carpet. “It’s not like he thought he got robbed for real.”

Bruce wondered if he should revise his estimated chances with Hal. If he was still speaking to Oliver after a stunt like that…

“What would you have done?” Oliver demanded.

“Buy the building and revise policy so that any absent tenants facing eviction would have their belongings transferred to basement storage for a minimal monthly fee and have first chance at any open units once they cleared back-rent?” Bruce asked. It was hardly a perfect solution, but it would have minimized any significant blow to Hal’s ego while preserving his living situation.

“Yeah, I don’t see making myself his landlord going over any better than relocating his stuff,” Oliver scoffed.

“You wouldn’t be his landlord. That’s what property managers and subsidiaries are for.”

“Still not any better.”

“It would be a sound financial investment instead of wasting several thousand dollars solely to enrage a close friend, so permit me to disagree.” Bruce glanced at the clock. “As enlightening as all of this has been, I’ve got another meeting soon.”

Oliver brushed the crumbs off his shirt and sighed. “Just...think about it, okay? You know how much shit Hal gets for spending so much time on earth with all the other planets on his beat, and how much crap is going on with the Corps right now. It’d be really easy for him to just peace-out on us one of these days, especially if he knows there’s nothing much of a life waiting for him to come back to. Ferris might close up shop on him, his brothers might not pick up the phone when he calls, the Watchtower might be blasted to bits again, but whatever else you’ve got going on in your life, including that time you let everyone think you were dead--”

“That is a gross misrepresentation of what happened, and you know it.” Even if he’d been aware of the mistake, he wouldn’t have had a way to get a message to anyone to correct it.

“--for _three fucking months_ , we all know Alfred’s there keeping the lights on in that damn fortress of yours.”

Bruce softened a little, then shook his head. “As much of a point as you may or may not have, you’re jumping the gun, Ollie.”

“Yeah, sure.” Oliver stretched. “Your scale of caring about things goes from ‘someone waving a gun in your face’ to ‘Hal not agreeing with you,’ and it runs in the wrong direction. But naturally, I’m the one who’s wrong about where this is going now that you’ve finally gotten around to sleeping together.”

“I do not care more about whether or not Hal agrees with me than someone brandishing a deadly weapon at me,” Bruce said.

“Whatever,” Oliver huffed. “This is what I get for not having a recorder handy when you two spent that entire trip back from New Genesis bickering about whether Big Belly Burger or Taco King was better. I just want to make it clear right now that I expect a call acknowledging my keen powers of observation when you two can’t make it through dinner without sneaking into the men’s room for a makeout session, and I want a spot at the head table when you put a ring on it.”

Bruce shook his head and wondered if even Oliver could tell when he was being serious anymore.


	4. Chapter 4

Hal rested his forehead on Bruce’s shoulder, breathing hard and shivering. His skin tingled pleasantly, and his heart was thumping in his ears. Bruce’s hands were still digging into his hips, and he looked as gone as Hal felt. He reluctantly eased off Bruce’s cock and tugged his pants back up, bracing himself against the dashboard with some difficulty. He hadn’t cared about the car’s cramped interior when he’d pulled Bruce into the passenger seat and started kissing him, but it certainly was making things interesting now that he needed to get presentable again. 

He was grateful the parking garage was practically deserted. There were subtle ways to fuck in a car, and he’d figured out a great number of them in the Air Force, but this particular car wasn’t suited for any of them.

“We probably can’t walk in there looking like this, can we?” Hal asked, buttoning his shirt back up. Bruce’s lips were swollen, and his eyes were dark, and he looked exactly as debauched as he’d been.

“We lost the reservation half an hour ago,” Bruce told him. He kissed Hal’s throat, his tongue hot against the sweat-cooled skin, and Hal groaned when he stopped. “It’s a moot point.”

“If we don’t have anywhere to be, we could just keep doing this as long as we want, right?” Hal pulled Bruce’s mouth back to his neck and ran his fingers through the dark silk of Bruce’s hair.

“Mmm. The security guard who’ll be by in another ten minutes would probably object,” Bruce said. “We could pick something up and continue this discussion in an actual bedroom, if you like.”

“An actual bedroom? Kinky.”

Bruce shook his head and started the engine.

Hal relaxed and let the thrum of the machinery burrow into his bones as Bruce maneuvered the car expertly through the streets. He let his eyes wander over Bruce’s frame, and the thought came, unbidden, of how he’d look stretched out on Oliver’s bed.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, looking out the window instead. The last of the city was giving way to scrubland, a gradually-recovering shadow of the forest that had once been.

“What is it?” Bruce cut their speed as the road began to wind.

“You and Dinah and Oliver?” He wasn’t sure how to say it, wasn’t even sure he wanted to. But it had been gnawing at him since that morning, and Bruce calling to ask if he wanted to go out sometime had only banked the fire, not extinguished it.

“Was there a question in there somewhere?” 

“You know what I’m trying to ask,” Hal sighed. Of course, Bruce avoiding it told him more than he wanted to know.

“I don’t,” Bruce said, glancing at him. “I assume you’re referring to the threeway I had once, several years ago, with Dinah and Oliver, but past that, no. Even I need the occasional clue to go on. Is it having happened at all a problem for you?”

“Shit,” Hal muttered. He rubbed his forehead and straightened in the seat. “You know what? I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I don’t know why I brought it up.”

Bruce snorted softly, and Hal wasn’t surprised to see him shake his head, almost to himself.

“Did he really leave a note in your empty apartment saying he’d relocated everything to Star City?” Bruce asked after a moment.

Hal stared at Bruce, trying to figure out where that had come from. “Told you about that, did he?”

“He considered it a cautionary tale,” Bruce explained. “Things not to do, if I wanted to stay on your good side.”

“And this came up how?” Hal asked, though he was pretty sure he knew.

“Organically, in conversation,” Bruce said, “during a meeting about Queen Industries’ Latin American holdings.”

“Naturally,” Hal muttered. He wondered how that talk had gone. Had Oliver been trying to sell Bruce on the idea of giving it a shot? Or had it all been warnings? _Don’t do this, don’t say that, you need to treat him with kid gloves._ Like Oliver was one to talk. 

Hal stiffened. Had this date been Bruce’s idea, or Oliver’s?

“I got the rather distinct sense he’s decided to play matchmaker.” 

“Yeah, that’s one way to put it.” Hal rubbed his jaw and thought of the pitch Oliver had given him. _He fucks like it’s an Olympic sport._

“Or disapproves, but has recently discovered the concept of reverse psychology,” Bruce continued conversationally.

And just like that, Hal realized he was being an idiot. Who cared what Oliver was up to? Bruce didn’t seem to, and that’s who he was going home with.

“Ah, the hell with it,” he snorted. “What I wanted to ask was how likely is there to be a repeat?”

He wasn’t even certain he could articulate why it mattered, beyond a vague sense of Bruce fielding better offers than he could ever hope to make.

“It depends,” Bruce said, his face drawn slightly in the way he had when he was thinking deeply about something. “It wasn’t likely to happen in the first place. It would be out of the question if I was seeing someone at the time. If I was single, I probably wouldn’t say no, assuming they asked a second time under similar circumstances, but I wouldn’t initiate. I don’t see the invitation being extended again, though.”

It was as thorough an answer as he could have hoped for. “Can I ask why?”

“There was some social blowback, and Oliver took it harder than I’d have expected.” Bruce shrugged. “We had a good time. It was fun. But I think it rattled him enough that he’d hesitate to do it again.”

“Huh.” Hal hadn’t expected that answer, but there it was. It was hard to imagine Ollie having much shame about something like that, but then he thought of the way Oliver had gotten defensive about Hal judging him. Whatever it was, it still stung, apparently. “Just for the record, I would be incredibly pissed if I came home to an empty apartment a second time. I mean, April Fool’s pranks probably aren’t something you go in for, but. That one wouldn’t go over well.”

“It might surprise you to hear this, but Oliver is quite frequently not as clever as he thinks he is,” Bruce said.

“You don’t say.” Hal looked around. At some point, the landscape had given way to what was clearly Bruce’s estate, and he wasn’t sure when. As carefully as Bruce guarded his privacy, there was nothing stopping Hal from dropping in whenever the mood took him, so long as he kept the glow to a minimum when he did it. It wasn’t like in Jack’s neighborhood, or even Carol’s, where the neighbors would eventually notice a guy swooping out of the sky and into their backyards.

“Mm. For instance, he predicted that we wouldn’t make it through dinner without sneaking out to neck.”

Hal couldn’t quite bite back a smirk at that. Sneaking out of dinner would require them to have even come close to making it to dinner in the first place.

“Doesn’t he have like two entire criminal empires plotting his downfall?” he asked. “How can this possibly be what he’s spending his time on right now?”

“Procrastination is a skill he mastered early,” Bruce said. The gravel of the manor’s drive crunched under the tires, and he slowed even further. Hal looked at the mansion and wondered how many times the house he grew up in could fit inside the ivy-limned walls.

“If this doesn’t work out, things are going to get weird, aren’t they?” he asked.

“I dress up like a bat and get into fights that could just as easily be mistaken for an errant Mardi Gras float. You have a magic ring you were given by little green men. We met keeping an evil god from another dimension from taking over the planet, when he invaded because he was angry at the extraterrestrial from Kansas with whom we are both friends.” Bruce killed the engine and gave him a long look. “If you’re worried about ‘weird,’ I’m afraid we’re going to need a time machine.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Hal murmured. He’d expected Bruce to have some pat line about them both being adults. He hadn’t expected Bruce to have a sense of humor about it, never mind actively tease him.

“Fortunately, we both know at least two people with access to one, so that shouldn’t be difficult to manage.”

Hal bit his lip and tried not to smile. “You know, technically, Oans are blue. And some of them are female.”

Oliver hadn’t been entirely wrong, he thought. Bruce already knew everything about him, and it obviously hadn’t put him off.

“Oh, well never mind, then,” Bruce snorted. “Perfectly pedestrian magic rings handed out by perfectly average little blue people.” 

Hal wanted to kiss the sardonic smile off his face, but it was gone when Bruce turned to face him. 

“I think we’re in for a fair amount of weirdness, awkward behavior, and uncomfortable League meetings no matter how this goes, Hal. If it works, if it doesn’t, if it winds up somewhere in between--there’s a certain irreducible complexity to both our lives that’s not going away.” 

“Not to mention we once spent half an hour arguing what sort of fluorescents to install in the Watchtower’s elevators,” Hal added. 

“And also that.” Bruce tilted his head, his eyes questioning. “Do you still want to come up? I understand if you’re having second thoughts.”

Hal leaned across the seat and kissed him, slowly and thoroughly, and unbuckled his seatbelt.


	5. Chapter 5

Dinah yawned and added a second splash of whiskey to her coffee. She indulged herself rarely enough these days, and she suspected that the universe would forgive her for it after last night. She still wasn’t certain that she’d made the right decision, but she was damn sure it had been a difficult one. Oliver swore he knew what he was doing, but she didn’t like letting the line play out with men she now knew for a fact had been hired to kill him.

She made her way to the den, a sheaf of last night’s surveillance photos in hand. Her knees ached, and her shoulder was sore, and her eyes narrowed when she saw the too pleased by half look on Oliver’s face. He was using the coffee table as an impromptu desk, and it didn’t take a detective to figure out that the price indices, accounts payable statements, and HR reports piled up in front of him had nothing to do with his good mood.

“Do I want to know?” she asked.

“What?” He grinned and leaned back, lacing his fingers together behind his head.

“Don’t you ‘what?’ me, Oliver Queen,” Dinah sighed. “I had a late night following up on stuff you should have been taking care of.” She dropped the photos on top of his paperwork and sipped her coffee. “And now you’re sitting in here looking like the cat that got the cream.”

Oliver spread his knees and patted one thigh, his arm crooked invitingly. She shook her head.

“Explanations first, mister. I didn’t spend eight hours last night _not_ beating a bunch of assassins to a pulp just to find out you’ve come up with a way to get a third person to put a price on your head.”

“And have I told you how much I love you lately?” he asked. “Because it’s a lot, and it’s not just because you’ll tamp down those killer instincts for me.”

“Ollie,” she warned.

“It’s no big deal,” he said quickly, holding up his hands. “Well, okay, it’s a big deal, but it’s not that sort of big deal. It’s the good kind of big deal, not the kind of big deal where all this stuff with the Criminal Conspiracy of Evil Academics or whatever they’re calling themselves these days has reminded China White that I exist and also that she hates me and has enough money to hire an army to murder me to death.”

Dinah watched him silently and drank her coffee, and he flipped through the photos so he didn’t have to meet her gaze.

“China White?” she asked.

“Um.” He turned one of the pictures over in his hands. “These are really well composed for surveillance shots, did you take a class in college or something?”

“As in, Chien Na Wei? As in, the Triad heavy who--”

“Yes,” Oliver said quickly. “Her.”

“Also hates you and wants you dead.” Dinah rubbed the back of her neck and reminded herself of all the people who didn’t, so far as she knew, have some deep-seated emotional need to see Oliver six feet under.

“In my defense, she hasn’t really acted on that desire in…” Oliver trailed off, counting to himself. “...four years? Five years? It’s been a while.”

“It’s nine in the morning, Ollie,” she pointed out. “I’ve been up all night tailing people who should by all rights have gotten scooped up by the cops thanks to an anonymous tip called in by a very convenient observer who happened to notice them loading unregistered automatic weapons into their van while she was down by the docks at three a.m. walking her dog. Because multiple someones are actively planning to kill you. Given all that, you may want to choose your next words very carefully.”

“Uh, thank you? A lot? Marry me?” he hazarded. “Let me buy you a pretty deserted island somewhere nobody’s ever heard of, and you can turn it into a ninja-training death-trap just like you’ve always wanted?”

The last one wasn’t half bad, she thought. He was getting better at figuring out what to distract her with.

“Define the good kind of big deal,” Dinah said finally. She’d had enough surprises for one week.

“Oh.” Oliver grinned, back on safer ground. “I may have nudged Bruce and Hal into admitting that they belong together. I may, in fact, have gotten them together, full stop.”

Dinah suddenly regretted not having gone a lot harder on the whiskey. “I feel like I shouldn’t have to explicitly tell you not to spend your free time plotting to destroy the League, babe.”

He rolled his eyes and huffed. “But they’re in love! And they’ve been in love since, what, six months after they first met? How can you compare two people who love each other finally getting together to some weird villainous endgame?”

“Because there are people like Lois and Clark, or Diana and Steve, who fall in love like sane, normal, rational human beings, where it’s a beautiful thing and everyone benefits and we all wish we could be so lucky. And then there are people like Bruce, where it’s closer to how matches love gasoline,” Dinah said. It had been one of the things that had made her pull away from him, way back when. As lovers, they’d been bad for each other for all the same reasons they’d worked well as friends. 

“Okay, he can be a little--”

“Or, in Hal’s case,” she interrupted firmly, “where it’s exactly like fighter pilots love things that can smash them into the ground at fifteen hundred miles per hour and leave them scattered in pieces all over three counties, and the best you can hope for is that they won’t take out a building full of innocent bystanders when the inevitable happens.”

“But...they’re in _love_ ,” Oliver repeated, like she’d maybe just missed it when he’d said it the first time.

Dinah sighed, and Oliver sensed an opening. He patted his leg again, and this time Dinah humored him and sat on his lap. He wrapped her up in a bearhug, and she leaned against his chest.

“Don’t you think maybe you should have let them figure it out for themselves?” she asked gently.

“It’s not like I spiked their drinks with MDMA and locked them in a room with a couples counselor,” he said. “I just got Hal out of the house and having some fun for once in the last year and then made sure neither of them chickened out after nature took its course.”

Dinah glanced at the stacks of corporate detritus and tried to imagine Oliver successfully cajoling Bruce into doing anything he’d decided was a bad idea. He could dig in his heels with the best of them if he felt like he was being handled, and Oliver generally wasn’t subtle when he had a plan he was convinced was brilliant. She’d also discovered over the years that Bruce went in for the misdirect as often as he went in for the frontal assault. She chalked it up to his time with Zatanna.

“Is this really the time to be auditing your South American stuff?” she asked. “It probably does need it--graft is endemic--but right now?”

“You know how Bruce is trying to sever ties with all the LexCorp subsidiaries because even when Luthor’s in jail, his companies are still capitalist nightmare-factories? And that means steering their KORD arm at us instead?” Oliver sighed, making a face. “Well, apparently he’d like us to also not be capitalist nightmare-factories, and this is what happens when I actually show up for meetings when I schedule them.”

“He promised to take Hal out on a proper date if you did your homework?”

“Ah.” Oliver cleared his throat, and she sipped her coffee and waited for it to sink in. “Well. Not in so many words. He strongly implied that he’d take Hal out on a proper date if I did my homework. Sort of.” His shoulders slumped. “Damn it.”

“Babe, I love you, but maybe take it as a sign to stop trying to set up our friends,” Dinah said, resting her cheek on his head.

“Not until everyone’s as happy as we are,” he chuckled, holding her close. “Or at least not until there’s a bylaw prohibiting it. You know, whichever comes first.”


End file.
